HP, Dell Unveil Servers Powered by Nvidia, AMD

Upcoming new servers by HP and Dell are the latest example of the growing interest in GPU computing from the HPC space.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell are continuing to build servers that bring graphics
chips into the data center.
HP
officials on May 17 announced that Nvidia's new Tesla M2090 GPU
(graphics processing unit) will appear in a number of upcoming HP ProLiant
servers aimed at the HPC (high-performance
computing) space, a move they say will address organizations' demands for
greater performance and energy efficiency.

The
announcement from HP and Nvidia came a day after officials from Dell and
Advanced Micro Devices, at the Microsoft TechEd show, said the server maker
will roll out the PowerEdge M610x blade, which will include AMD's
FirePro V7800P GPUs. Officials with both Dell and AMD
said the combination of Dell blades with AMD
GPUs will help in such areas as HPC and
desktop virtualization.

HPC
organizations have been particularly strong adopters of GPUs
for computing tasks. For workloads optimized for parallel processing,
companies can get much more performance with GPUs-which offer hundreds of
cores-than with traditional CPUs alone, and without increasing power
consumption.
"The
high performance computing (HPC) segment has
an endless thirst for performance and this has made the use of GPUs a
disruptive force," Ed Turkel, marketing manager for HPC
for HP, said in a May 17 blog
post on the Nvidia Website. "For researchers, scientists and engineers,
enhanced performance allows for faster innovation that will result in the kinds
of discoveries that can change the world."
Nvidia
officials called the Tesla M2090 the world's fastest parallel processing chip,
which can hold as many as 512 cores and can offer application acceleration 10
times that of CPUs alone. The Tesla M2090 GPU
will be available on HP's new ProLiant SL390 G7 4U server, which Nvidia officials
said was built specifically for hybrid computing environments that use both
GPUs and CPUs.

According
to HP's Turkel, the Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer in Japan-named
the world's fourth-fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list in November 2010-is
an example of what GPU computing can offer.
The system uses 1,408 ProLiant SL390s G7 servers, and delivers similar peak
performance as Cray's XT5 Jaguar system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
However, Tsubame 2.0 does all that with 92 percent fewer servers and consumes
one-seventeenth of the power than Jaguar, which is powered by AMD's
Opteron chips.
"Take
that into consideration and it's easy to see why GPUs have made such an impact
in HPC," Turkel said.
AMD
officials said Dell's new server is the FirePro's first foray into the data center.
The FirePro V7800P is designed to offer fast performance and massive parallel
processing in what officials said is a passively cooled form-factor. Like
FireStream GPUs launched a year ago, the FirePro V7800P are designed without
fans; instead, the heat sinks use air flow in the server chassis for cooling.
With
the new offering, Dell and AMD are
continuing what has been a successful partnership over the past few years,
according to Brian Payne, executive director of platform marketing for Dell's
PowerEdge server portfolio.
"We're
collaborating together to drive innovation around graphics processing solutions
and you won't find a better example than our Dell PowerEdge M610x blade," Payne
said in a statement. "This blade helps support and accelerates multiple remote
users while providing a rich graphical experience and maximum hardware asset
utilization."
In
addition to graphics, AMD's FirePro V7800P
can be used for a wide range of workloads, according to Sandeep Gupte, director
of professional graphics product management at AMD.
"The
AMD FirePro V7800P is AMD's
first multifunctional server solution for compute, VDI [virtual desktop
infrastructure] and professional graphics offering, IT departments GPU
compute for high-performance computing matched with leading-edge graphics
virtualization," Gupte said in a statement. "The AMD
FirePro V7800P allows AMD to draw upon a
powerful professional graphics solution to meet the needs of an entirely new
set of data center customers."